His office at the University of Michigan, where he heads the Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing, is neat and spare, his desk immaculate. On the surface all seems simple and ordinary, much like the Middle Western characters he writes about. But beyond the cover of Believers, his latest collection of stories (released in March by Pantheon Books), readers will find themselves, like Baxter's characters, questioning whether modern society, with its ceaseless communication and endless flow of facts and figures, offers any truths at all. Baxter was interviewed by Jane Ratcliffe '85 BFA, an Ann Arbor freelance writer and novelist.

Michigan Today: A line from your title story, "Believers"—where the narrator has just described his father's shifting emotions as clouds passing over a field and says, "I was the child in that field, over which the clouds passed"—made me wonder if it referred to your life.
Charles Baxter: One of my early readers marked that line and said, "I think you should take this out." "Self-pity" was the marginal comment. But I thought it really was not self-pity. The guy is trying to explain who he is and who he was. And that was the image I wanted. And I thought: No, this line is going to stay in. I like this line.

MT: Was the father, Franz Pielke, based on your father? It seemed to me that that story might have been painful to write.
CB: The father's character is all made up. My father died when I was a year-and-a-half old; I have no memory of him. It's all an imaginary construct of what I imagined my father might have been like or what I imagined that person's father might have been like. I often imagine characters into existence I would like to have known. I think something was long dormant in me—wanting to have a father. And having, in some sense, a father who never spoke to me. It wasn't painful until the very end, and that caught me by surprise. I was doing fine until I got to the scene between the narrator and his father at the end in the retirement home. That just tore me up.

MT: Were you raised by your mother alone?
CB: My mother and my step-father. My mother married again when I was three years old. Father Pielke is not like my step-father. My step-father was an attorney in Minneapolis. And there are elements of his life in [the character] Burton Jordan, an American who goes to Germany in 1938. Jordan is not based on him, but I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that from my step-father's life. Actually, I worried that he might read the book and be hurt by it, but he's now too old. He can't read anymore, and it's not clearly derived from him.

MT: Are you hesitant to draw characters from real life and therefore censor yourself somewhat?
CB: I do. I try not to write about people whom I know. On this occasion, I thought about holding the manuscript from publication so that no one would be offended. Then I thought that I couldn't withhold this story forever, and besides I don't think he would mind. I dedicated the entire book to him.

MT: Spiritual, magical, religious themes occur in subtle ways throughout your work, especially in this collection. Do you have particular spiritual or religious beliefs?
CB: Not very many, but some. I think of it more as a subject that at this point in our history, this time in our cultural life, is important for stories. And the reason I think so is that when you consider the way stories often work, there's usually a moment when a character is compelled to believe something. Many people out there are making their way in the world by telling other people things that aren't true. And so I started to think that belief was really one of those matters that made a majority of stories work as stories. And I thought: I can start this at the bottom with characters who are either liars or truth-tellers and make it a serious matter in the opening story, "Kiss Away," with a young woman who gets involved with a guy who may or may not be abusive. He hasn't been abusive to her, but somebody has told her that he has been at one time. Whom does she believe? Finally she believes the guy's dog.

MT: I love the word "shelter" and noticed that it often appeared in your writing—you even have a story by that name—and that the men are turning to the women for shelter.
CB: Oh yes, no doubt of that. At the end of the story "Shelter," the main character turns to his wife and, instead of saying, "Let's make love," says, "Shelter me." I think that a kind of male pride creates, not a myth, exactly, but a kind of a story of who men are in relation to women. They must be the ones who make the first move, who are aggressive. We all know these myths. Because that mode is so predominant, I'm interested in the other side of it, which is that physically and otherwise women provide for men as much of the physical shelter and the psychic shelter as men do for women. It is complementary. It doesn't go just one way. It's not as though men build the houses in which women live. It goes the other way, too. I like the sense that arises when men recognize that.

MT: Do you write with a precise idea in mind, say about how gender roles have switched, or do you just instinctively get it on paper, then go back and say, oh, so this is what I was writing about-gender roles?
CB: It's more like that—I discover what I'm doing as I do it. It's a mix. With "Believers" I had the idea that I was going to take some Americans from the late 1930s, send them to Germany—because there were still Americans who were tourists in Germany in '38—and from this I would get some kind of story going about belief, Americans, Nazis, all that. I wrote that story very deliberately. I had to research all of this information about what Germany looked like then, what was going on, what kind of German people were speaking in what part of the country. So I have some idea, some picture in my imagination when I start, but I haven't got the entire structure mapped out. I don't know necessarily where it's going to go. That's the excitement.

MT: Do you find you put more time into the rewriting than the actual first effort?
CB: I spend more time on the rewriting. Different writers will tell you different tales about rewriting. I start work around eight and quit around noon. I usually don't write when I'm teaching. I write during the summer and the time I have off. But it's hard for me, especially when I've been working on something, and I get all charged up about it, and then the school year starts, and I have to shut the whole thing thing down. I can't do both. I've tried, and I just don't have the energy and I cannot split myself between subjects. I have to invest myself in my work.

MT: It must have been a difficult choice.
CB: But it is a choice, and the University does a wonderful job of supporting me. As things stand I can't support myself quite on my writing. If I could, it would be a different situation. Most writers of literary fiction in this country would have a hard, hard time supporting themselves. If you rented a room in an attic and ate cottage cheese and ketchup, you could probably manage.

MT: Did you have an easy time at first getting published?
CB: No. Nobody does. I have a box full of rejections. Like everybody else I could wallpaper my study with the rejection slips I got. You have to develop a system to get over the feeling of rejection. When I got my first book acceptance, I felt: It's all right. What ever else happens I have this book.

MT: Do you have any aspirations toward Hollywood where there is more money?
CB: I don't write the sort of story that is easily translated to film, although there is going to be a feature film made about one of my earlier stories called "Westland." They are going to start shooting that story in April, much of it around here. It's about a guy who is walking around the zoo and sees a girl there who is pointing a gun at a lion..

MT: Who are writers you admire? Who influenced your writing growing up?
CB: Oh, that is a big, big question. For me the Russians: Chekhov, Tolstoy. But that's true for almost every writer, I think. And because I am a Midwesterner there are Midwestern writers I have always paid a lot of attention to: Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, William Maxwell, Evan Connell.

MT: Why are you so drawn to the Midwest?
CB: For two reasons. I grew up in Minnesota. I was educated in Minnesota. I spent most of my life in the general geographical area of the Great Lakes. My first job out of graduate school was at Wayne State University in Detroit. So I've spent almost all of my life here, and I started to think of what it means to live in the Midwest. That's one subject among many others. What kinds of people live here? Well, Elmore Leonard took care of the criminal psychopaths in Detroit. Jim Harrison does another sort of thing. And Janet Kauffman writes about women who are farming near Jackson and other subjects. So what I have left is, for better or worse, a kind of middle-range middle America. When you think of "Middle America," you think of something terrible like Leave it to Beaver. So the real challenge is in making these lives interesting again without whooping it up with too much violence or hysteria.

MT: When did your desire to write begin?
CB: I went to one of those lousy high schools in Minnesota. I hated it. I started reading and found books that I loved. I thought 10th or 11th grade "This is what I want to do."

MT: Chekhov and Tolstoy?
CB: No, trashy books Davis Grubb. Nobody knows who he is, but I loved his novels. Then I made my way up to better authors, and I still thought, "This is what I want to do." And I never lost that feeling.